There are flashes of bitter brilliance in this mobster picture from Ukrainian writer-director Oleg Sentsov, whose anti-Putin activism earned him a prison sentence from 2015 to 2019 – only ending after interventions from Amnesty International and the European parliament awarded him the Sakharov prize for human rights.
This is strong, fluent, sometimes impassioned film-making, but just as its troubled gangster antihero yearns for meaning in his life beyond violence, so this film appears to be straining for the same thing.
